Vignettes: They were there

Published 5:30 am, Monday, September 9, 2002

The New York Daily News columnist and author had finished his new novel late the night before. After a morning meeting, he planned to head to Kinko's to copy the manuscript and send it off, then celebrate by taking his wife to lunch at Balthazar.

Instead, Hamill found himself standing at the corner of Vesey and Broadway in lower Manhattan, staring into the gutter at the remnants of someone else's morning -- an unopened bottle of V-8 Splash, a cheese danish in a cellophane wrapper and a woman's black shoe, sticky with blood.

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Looking up at the fireball eating through the World Trade Center, he saw a shirtless man tumbling, then plunging, fast and face-first, from the sky.

When the towers began to crumble, Hamill and his wife, journalist Fukiko Aoki, ran, but lost each other in the dust. After a frantic search, each trudged home, collapsing in a relieved hug when they found each other outside their apartment.

"By Wednesday morning, the iron workers showed up at the Trade Center and said, `We cut steel. Do you need us?' They didn't call anyone. They weren't hired. They just came," Hamill said. "When I saw them, I said, `We'll be OK.' "

Looking back on his year, Hamill remembers the odor of burning rubble that hung in the air past Christmas, the Korean deli down the street that fed the neighborhood because it was the only store with power, World Series players wearing NYPD and FDNY caps.

He remembers crossing the barricades into the frozen zone to get home each day, carrying his passport for a photo ID and his Con-Ed bill as proof of residence.

"Now I walk and I see normalcy -- lovers sitting on a bench by the river, kissing," he said. "I see old people reading large-print versions of Danielle Steel. I see Mexicans eating ice cream cones. I see people running down to the corner market for No. 2 milk and three mangoes."

"To me, those are also images of this year," he said. "I cherish the idea that there was no mass exodus, and that people said, `You gotta get on with it. You gotta live.' "

For long minutes, the Houston businessman flying home from Germany on Sept. 11 had eyed his plane's course projected on a screen in the main cabin. The Air France jet undoubtedly was traveling north into Canada, not south as scheduled.

Unaware of the morning's earlier events or that the FAA had ordered his plane -- and roughly 4,500 others around the nation -- to land at the nearest airport, Krouse became convinced he would die.

What he thought was smoke pouring from an engine was actually fuel being dumped to facilitate landing at a small airport. When the aircraft's nose dipped for a wild descent, he thought a crash was imminent.

The jumbo jet landed at the tiny airport in Halifax, Nova Scotia. As armed guards patrolled the tarmac, Krouse and his fellow passengers were kept on board. Rumor ran rampant. Many were terrified that a nuclear attack had occurred. Some were crying.

Ten hours after they landed, passengers finally were bused to a makeshift shelter. Krouse, who bedded down on mats in a high school gym, returned to Houston when flights resumed from Halifax five days later. About 240 U.S.-bound flights had been stranded in Canada.

"It all was something like you'd see in a movie," Krouse recalled. "I was shocked. I was stunned like a deer in the headlights. I never did get around to praying."

NEW YORK -- Col. John O'Dowd of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had been at his post as director of the New York district less than two months on Sept. 11.

O'Dowd was in the middle of a meeting on the 21st floor of Federal Plaza, just blocks from the twin towers, when the first plane hit.

"We heard a boom, and felt this building shake," he said.

As downtown began to evacuate, O'Dowd and his colleagues directed eight Corps ships in the harbor to start ferrying the injured and distraught off of Manhattan island.

"Every available boat in the harbor was nosed up to Battery Park, picking up civilians," O'Dowd said of those first hours. "Cruise ships, tug boats -- people grabbed sheets and spray-painted them, `Brooklyn' or `New Jersey,' and started loading people onboard. They'd take survivors off the island and pick up rescue workers for the ride back in."

Within days, the Corps was dredging New York Harbor, deepening long-dormant shipping lanes to make way for barges laden with heavy cranes and equipment needed at "Ground Zero" and carving out passages to carry debris across the river to Fresh Kills Landfill on Staten Island.

"The city was hit in as hard a way as you could hit a city," O'Dowd said. "Rather than lay down, folks here in New York stood up."

For Denise Corliss, 37, of Cypress, and her dog Bretagne, it was their first deployment with the FEMA-affiliated search and rescue squad from Texas. For a week, she and Bretagne hunted for life in the World Trade Center debris.

"My dog's objective is to find life scent. We did not find anybody who had survived," she said. "When not searching with my dog, I would search with my squad by hand near the rubble, looking for remains so that we could send those home."

The attention she's drawn makes her uneasy.

"I felt honored to be able to go and help, and I just felt that anybody would do what we were doing if given the opportunity," Corliss said. "And I don't think that's a hero."

NEW YORK -- When Fresh Kills Landfill began receiving tons of rubble from the World Trade Center last September, Deer Park's Garner Environmental Services Inc. was the first contractor on the hill. Mike Hall, of Clear Lake, arrived Sept. 14.

"There were piles and yards and yards and more yards of debris," Hall recalled.

The demolition specialist set to work organizing the chaos, separating steel from concrete and dividing the big from the small.

"We found a little bit of everything -- IDs, jewelry, clothes, tennis shoes, socks, combs," Hall said. "The first time you find something that's human, it's numbing. You go, `Oh God.' Two of my guys quit. They just said, `I don't want to do this anymore,' and I can appreciate that. I respect that."

Hall kept going back though, telling himself every day that he would try to find something that would comfort someone's family.

"If this had happened in Houston," he said, "I'm sure they would have come to help us."

The Fresh Kills Landfill had reopened the day before and Luongo was the police investigator charged with making sense of tons of World Trade Center debris arriving by barge from across the river.

The task was overwhelming -- and gruesome. Exhausted firefighters and police officers were working day and night in hopes of recovering the dead, including hundreds from their own ranks. Now family members were showing up at the dump, looking for proof of their loss, or some small artifact by which to remember their loved ones.

The Rev. Jack Ryan, a Jesuit from a nearby Catholic retreat house, responded to Luongo's call.

"You see the results of true, consummate evil here, but you look at the workers and you see good," Ryan said. "You see the consolation the families get just knowing these people have been up here, taking a quiet pride in their very tedious, very grim work."

For 10 months, Ryan spent his days at Fresh Kills, passing out sandwiches, saying Mass and counseling those who had seen and smelled too much. Each night, he returned to the Mount Manresa Jesuit Retreat House, which had become home to weary police and firefighters and cadaver-sniffing dogs.

When the dump closed in July, bagpipers from the city sanitation department band wailed a dirge and Ryan stood before the last pile of rubble.

"This is the type of thing you never get over, but you will get used to it," he told the workers and mourners. "You will experience joy in your lives again. Already the grass is growing here again. It's like that."

David Patterson, 39, directs the clinical embalming program at the Dallas Institute of Funeral Services. He was sent to New York after the attacks as part of the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response team.

At the New York City Medical Examiner's Office, he was part of the massive effort to identify the victims, preparing death certificates and compiling postmortem DNA information.

"Going up was easier than coming back," he said. "We had no idea what we were getting into."

"I'm basically a workaholic and it changed my idea on that. These people just went to work and died. It makes you stop and think."

NEW YORK -- Michele DeFazio wears her grief in a gold heart locket that weighs on her neck, and in a heart-shaped bracelet, and on her key chain, and on a button the size of a dessert plate pinned to her chest. All bear the same photo of her and Jason on their wedding day.

Her three-month marriage to the 29-year-old bonds broker was cut short Sept. 11, when he was lost in the World Trade Center attack.

"He was 6 foot, 220 pounds. He was in top physical condition. I swore he was alive in there," DeFazio said. "We had just started our life. We wanted to have kids."

After a month of waiting, the 26-year-old bride turned widow set up a table with her wedding photos and invited Jason's family and friends to a memorial service.

"I did it for them, not for me," she said this summer. "I still pretend he's just at work. That's how I get through the day."

Jason DeFazio's remains have never been recovered, but workers found his Cantor Fitzgerald ID card in the rubble at Fresh Kills. They returned it to his wife on Good Friday.

"I looked at it once, but now I can't," Michele DeFazio said. "It makes it real."

NEW YORK -- Shortly after becoming a New York City firefighter, Joe Murphy attended his first firefighter funeral.

"I saw the pipes and drums and said, `I want to play in that band,' " he said.

Murphy joined the FDNY Emerald Society Pipes and Drums 15 years ago; today he's chairman of the 70-member band.

Like every member, he fights fires as a full-time job and plays the pipes as a hobby.

Warming up in a scorching church parking lot in Queens last month, the kilt-clad 50-year-old described the past year as a depressing and monotonous marathon of services for 343 firefighters killed on Sept. 11. In many cases, the band marched and played at memorials, only to return later to play at funerals once body parts were identified and families had something to bury.

"In the beginning, we were playing seven days a week -- some days there were 10 or 20 funerals. We split up into groups and took turns, but there were still days where we'd each be playing four or five," Murphy said. "We'd just get up and go, one to the next, playing the same songs over and over -- `Amazing Grace' on the way into the church and `Going Home' on the way out. Next morning, get up and do it again."

A year later, Murphy is worn out. He longs for the old days, when most of the gigs were weddings and parties and grand, happy parades.

"Now, even for the good things, you just want to get it over with and leave," he said. "It's not fun anymore."

NEW YORK -- Making her way home on foot Sept. 11, Amy Weinstein, assistant curator for the New York Historical Society, was already thinking artifacts.

"We all had this sense that history is unfolding around us, and we have to start today," she said.

By the next morning, museum staffers were calling colleagues in Oklahoma City, Washington and Graceland, who advised them to start collecting immediately.

Police wanted the museum to store the remnants of a few cruisers, school officials were overwhelmed by letters and artwork sent by students from around the world, and firefighters didn't know what to do with all the candles, flags, notes and flowers accumulating outside their stations, which had become makeshift shrines. Transit officials eventually wanted to clear away the "Missing" fliers that had been posted on subway walls and bus stops.

The BBC in London offered thousands of e-mails received from people around the world the morning of Sept. 11, seeking information on loved ones who worked at the Trade Center.

St. Paul's Church, converted into a relief station for disaster workers, offered a cot that had been used by so many tired souls. The church also donated a sampling of care packages from children who sent drawings and thank-you letters, stuffed animals and Chapstick.

"This is part of the story of Sept. 11," Weinstein said. "Firefighters and policemen who had been working at the Trade Center would come in exhausted and dirty after digging for hours, and they would read these letters, and they would take the Teddy bears and Beanie Babies into the cots and sleep with them."

In all that was salvaged from the rubble, Weinstein and other museum staffers were stunned at the things they couldn't find.

"We told people, `We would like to get a crushed desk or chair or computer terminal,' and they said, `You don't get it,' " she said. "Everything was shattered or melted or vaporized. Tons and tons of paper from the offices, and business cards and photographs survived, but there was almost no glass left. All of those windows, and no glass."

Shortly after the first plane hit the World Trade Center, New York City Rudy Giuliani hurried to the site and narrowly escaped the collapse.

During a televised news conference that evening, the distraught and exhausted mayor told the world the casualties would be "more than most of us can bear."

Before he left office, he became an icon for the defiant city as it rose from the ashes.

On Wednesday, Giuliani will participate in the city's one-year anniversary ceremony by beginning the reading of the names of more than 2,800 people killed at Ground Zero.

THEODORE OLSON

WASHINGTON -- On the morning of Sept. 11, the nation's solicitor general received two phone calls from his wife, lawyer and television commentator Barbara Olson, who had been herded to the back of American Airlines Flight 77 with the other passengers and the pilots.

Her descriptions of the hijackers' tactics before the jetliner crashed into the Pentagon provided some of the first details of what went on aboard any of the planes.

The day Theodore Olson lost his wife, he decided that if returned to work at the Justice Department quickly and devoted himself intensely to his work, he'd have little time to brood.

He went back to the office six days after the attacks.

"I found the work a great comfort," he said. "I felt I would not be doing myself or anyone else any good by sitting at home."

He has since won all eight cases he argued before the Supreme Court and has led the Bush administration's battle for new powers in the name of national security.

Speaking at a Justice Department remembrance ceremony in December, he said, "We will fight this evil for as long as it takes."

CHAQUITA YOUNG

WASHINGTON -- Chaquita Young has her mother's quick smile and deep dimples. For the past 11 weeks, she had her mother's old job.

Deep inside the Pentagon, the 18-year-old college student has sat in a cubicle surrounded by those in the Army personnel office lucky enough to have survived the Sept. 11 terrorist attack.

As she leaves work each day, she stops outside Room 2E319, where a poster titled "America's Heroes" depicts the faces of the 184 victims killed at the Pentagon.

Lisa Young's robust, smiling face is on the bottom row, fourth from the left. Her daughter pauses to look at it on her way out the door and tell her mother bye.

Chaquita grew up at the Pentagon, going to work with her mother on school vacations, tapping on the typewriter, memorizing Army insignia until she could tell at a glance who was a major and who was a lieutenant colonel.

For Lisa Young, who was single and had no other children, the visits were priceless, co-workers said.

"Her life revolved around her daughter," recalled Lt. Col. Linda Herbert. "When Quita was not here, her mom was always talking about her. So when she came in here, it was like we already knew her."

Sometime in the spring, Chaquita decided she'd like a summer job at the Pentagon, in her mother's old office.

"Just to get the feel of my mom again," she said. "Just to have the sense of her spirit."

She placed her mother's picture -- the one used on her funeral program -- on her desk, right by a photo of herself as a smiling baby.

"It's like a little bit of her mom here," Lt. Col. Herbert said. "It's new life. It's life going on."

SHANKSVILLE, Pa. -- Before United Airlines Flight 93 fell out of the sky into a Pennsylvania field, Wally Miller spent his days in the trade of a small-town coroner and funeral home owner: natural deaths, a few car accidents, the occasional suicide or drug overdose.

Since Sept. 11, the Somerset County coroner has been caretaker of a national tragedy, the self-appointed advocate for the families of those who died when the plane slammed into the ground at 575 miles an hour.

Miller and the victims' families see the field as a cemetery.

The plane, too, was decimated. The largest pieces were the size of suitcases, the smallest the size of dimes.

"It just looked like somebody just dropped a bunch of metal out of the sky," Miller said.

Most plane crashes occur at takeoff or landing, not in a field far from the victims' homes and families. The fact that no one on the plane was from western Pennsylvania made it even more crucial to Miller that the families had a local ally.

"This just happens to be a random moment where the ground met the plane," he said. "They have no connection here at all."

Officially, Miller was charged with identifying the victims, returning what remains were recovered and caring for the site of the crash. He personally identified 12 bodies through fingerprints and teeth. The remaining 32 bodies had to be identified with DNA testing.

Unofficially, Miller took it upon himself to meet as many of the victims' families as he could and call those that did not come to Somerset County.

Miller now gets photographs and other "little snippets of these people's lives" from the families and talks to some of them regularly.

"I figured as long as I was around they'd have at least one friend," he said. "I'd do that for anybody."

-- Vignettes by Chronicle reporters Patty Reinert in New York; John W. Gonzalez in San Antonio; Rachel Graves in Shanksville, Pa.; Allan Turner and Alan Bernstein in Houston and Chronicle News Services.